Middle East and Other Musings: A MULTITUDE OF TOPICS.

They grow.

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Canadian Intelligence Finds Evidence of Chinese Interference in Elections

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Did President Ordain Arrest of Israeli Over Hunter Biden Investigation?

Professor Gal Luft is detained trying to board a routine flight to Tel Aviv from Cyprus.

Usually when Israelis travel to Cyprus from Israel it is for short vacations or business and with the expectation that they will be able to make the hop back to Tel Aviv — about a 40-minute flight — without a hitch. That, though, was not the case last week when Gal Luft, a professor and former Israeli lieutenant colonel, was arrested at Larnaca International Airport as he was preparing to board a return flight to Israel.

Mr. Luft was arraigned last Friday on charges of illegal arms trafficking but swiftly cast the claim as retaliation by President Biden for his cooperating with an investigation pertaining to his son, the artist Hunter Biden. It is probably outlandish to think that the impetus for the arrest of a fairly innocuous-looking Israeli citizen could have come from a vengeful White House — or is it?

The case, which was first reported by the Israeli news website Ynet and has since rippled across Greek and Cypriot press outlets, is by turns mysterious and portentous, particularly in light of the growing congressional scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s questionable business dealings with both Communist China and Ukraine.

In the first part of a tweet, the 56-year-old Mr. Luft stated, “I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the US,” adding, “I’ve never been an arms dealer.” In the second part he wrote that “the Department of Justice is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim, and Hunter Biden. Shall I name names?”

It is possible that he already has. Ynet reported that Mr. Luft’s attorney, Mordechai Tzivin, claimed that his client’s arrest “was politically motivated and an attempt to silence him for providing incriminating information in a corruption case allegedly involving Biden’s son, Hunter.” Mr. Tzivin said that “the arrest came four years after Luft cooperated with FBI and Department of Justice investigators to help them with information about the case.” He added that the meeting took place in 2019.

Hunter Biden announced in December 2020 that he was under federal investigation for alleged tax crimes. Jim Biden is the president’s brother. Yet who is Mr. Luft, and how did he get so tangled up in an international web of intrigue that risks throwing Washington, Jerusalem, and Nicosia into an awkward triangle?

Neither Mr. Tzivin nor the Israeli embassy at Nicosia have yet responded to requests for comment. However, Israeli press reports describe Mr. Luft as a defense and energy expert and co-director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. He has penned opinion pieces for the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post and appeared as a commentator on CNBC, where he spoke about the phenomenon of “de-dollarization” that has arguably accelerated under the Biden administration.

The Jerusalem Post reported that “in a 2021 Beijing summit titled ‘International Forum on Democracy: the Shared Human Values,’ Luft accused the Biden administration’s ‘commitment to democracy going only as far as its interests allow.’”

The Interpol Red Notice issued at the request of the United States claimed that Mr. Luft was wanted in relation to illegally selling arms to Libya and Communist China and fraud for offenses that allegedly occurred from 2015 onward, the Jerusalem Post reported. That is curious, as neither of those nations is at a loss for weaponry. Plus, this comes at a time when Beijing appears to have no qualms about selling arms to Russia.

There are high stakes at play. Mr. Tzivin told Ynet that Mr. Luft’s testimony could “bury Hunter Biden, that’s why they’re trying to bury him first.” He added that any such testimony “will be very devastating” and will “divert attention to [President Biden] himself.” The lawyer also said that it’s “not unreasonable to think that the Democrats or some of their peers would like him gone.” He maintained that his client is “in great danger.”

What exactly Mr. Tzivin meant by that was not immediately clear. Ynet reported that Mr. Luft has been remanded in custody until another hearing on his extradition to America.

Regardless of whether those extradition hearings proceed, it is now more likely than not that the case will cross the radar of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who has made clear his intentions to pursue issues of alleged corruption related to a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. The likelihood of that will only grow if Mr. Luft, whether from shores Cypriot or American, decides to make good on his taunt to “name names.”

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Report: Iran is ‘Mapping’ Jewish Leaders Worldwide for Assassination if Israel Strikes

Jewish News Syndicate (JNS)

The Iranian government is “mapping” Jews around the world with plans to kill them if Israel attacks Iran, according to a report in London’s Jewish Chronicle.

Catherine Perez-Shakdam, a Middle East scholar and research fellow at a think tank, met Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February 2017. She believes that he was unaware that she is Jewish.

According to Perez-Shakdam, the only thing Khamenei fears is an Israeli attack. “He believes Netanyahu’s threats, and he knows that for now, Israel is militarily superior,” she told the paper. “He feels that the Iranian regime can’t sustain a defeat.”

During her trip, Perez-Shakdad was told of a plan to “map key Jewish figures around the world for Iran’s assassination squads,” per the Chronicle.

“The idea was to identify all prominent NGOs run by Jews, who was doing what in each business sector, the important rabbis,” she said. “They wanted to figure out their influence and where they lived with their families in order to target them.”

The paper noted that in November, British intelligence’s MI5 stated it had foiled 10 assassination attempts in just one year. It did not say if any of those attempts targeted Jews.

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Market comments from Goldman:

Q4 Earnings Takeaways: No Recession, Fewer Labor Shortages, Continued Wage Pressures

With recession risk elevated and potentially hinging on the outlook for wage growth and inflation, we review Q4 corporate earnings season by analyzing company fundamentals, changes in 2023 forecasts, and management commentary. Our analysis produced four key takeaways:

Positive but below-potential economic growth. Real revenue growth for the S&P 500 has slowed but remains positive—we estimate at +1½% both year-on-year and sequentially (ex energy). This would be broadly consistent with the below-trend pace of GDP growth required to rebalance the labor market without a recession. Companies also continue to invest, with nominal capex spending up 17% year-on-year in nominal terms and 10% in real terms. And 2023 capex expectations actually increased during earnings season for all sectors except the struggling TMT category (technology, media, and telecom). For now, companies appear to be responding to lower margins and higher financing costs by cutting share buybacks—which fell 12% in the quarter—as opposed to reducing investment or employment.

Falling earnings not yet concerning. One possible red flag in the economic outlook is the downward revision to 2023 consensus earnings expectations. However, downward earnings revisions are common at the beginning of the year, and while the 8% pullback in 2023 consensus since July is larger than the -3% historical median, we find that neither EPS revisions nor prior-year EPS growth is a useful leading indicator of the economy. Earnings and revenues also continue to rise in the consumer and industrial sectors, an encouraging trend given that consumption and equipment capex represent three quarters of the economy.

Significant improvement in labor availability. References to labor shortages in Russell 3000 earnings calls fell to the lowest level of the pandemic recovery, at 4.9% of Q4 earnings calls compared to 16.5% for 3Q21. Our more detailed review of Dow Jones and large-cap consumer company transcripts was even more encouraging: Two thirds of references pointed to increased labor availability, and no companies cited labor shortages worsening. Furthermore, several companies viewed the staffing situation as back to normal or nearly normal, including Starbucks and Hilton.

Wage pressures waning but not going away. Management teams were somewhat less optimistic about declining labor cost inflation. Of the 44 of these calls discussing wage pressures in Q4, only a third cited or expected sequential moderation. Staffing firm ManPower Group neatly summarized the message from corporates on this dimension: “We would expect wage inflation to continue to come down... but it's going to take a while.”

The significant increase in labor availability and the sequential easing in wage pressures are consistent with our forecast of a significant decline in core inflation to a still-above-target 3% in late 2023. And while most management teams did not take a strong stance on output or consumer prices in 2023, both our company price announcements tracker and our business inflation expectations index remain below last year’s highs.

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If you missed the webinar, please visit our YouTube channel to view the recording, here.

The BBC's Islamist Insiders

with Adam Levick of CAMERA UK

Abdel Bari Atwan is the London-based editor-in-chief of the online newspaper Rai al-Youm and someone with a long, well-documented record of antisemitism and support for anti-Israel violence. He had been a frequent guest discussing the Middle East on the BBC – until CAMERA UK's exposure ended that. But Atwan is just one of many Islamists featured by the BBC. Why does the network have a penchant for Islamists? With recent changes, might it turn over a new leaf? What can politicians do about this problem?

Adam Levick is co-editor of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting & Analysis UK (CAMERA UK). He previously worked for NGO Monitor, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Global Forum to Combat Antisemitism. His op-eds can be found in numerous publications. He has a BA from Temple University and emigrated to Israel from Philadelphia in 2009.

The Middle East Forum, an activist think tank, deals with the Middle East, Islamism, U.S. foreign policy, and related topics, urging bold measures to protect Americans and their allies. Pursuing its goals via intellectual, operational, and philanthropic means, the Forum recurrently has policy ideas adopted by the U.S. government.

And:

Gil Hoffman on New Developments in Media Coverage of Israel

by Marilyn Stern

Middle East Forum Webinar

https://www.meforum.org/64177/gil-hoffman-on-new-developments-in-media-coverage

Gil Hoffman, Executive Director of Honest Reporting (HR), an organization that combats ideological prejudice in journalism as it impacts Israel, spoke to a February 13th Middle East Forum Webinar (video) about Israel's portrayal in the media and HR's battle to set the record straight. The following is a summary of Hoffman's comments:

With over two decades of experience as the Jerusalem Post's former chief political correspondent, Hoffman believes the "fairest fight" for Israel is to win on the "media battlefield." Success there is the "key" to winning on the military battlefield, where Israel has the advantage, and on college campuses, where Israel is at a great disadvantage. Israel's communication lag after destroying Gaza's "CNN Tower" in May 2021 supports his view. Although it gave advance warning to avoid casualties, a month passed before Israel finally made the case that its destruction of the building, which was used by Hamas as its "cyber tower," actually "saved lives." Because of the communication lag, Israel lost the media advantage. The Jewish State learned its lesson in August 2022's Gaza war after lives were lost in the Jabalia refugee camp. Generally, military bureaucracy is slow to release information, but the decision to fast track the release of proof that Israel was blameless in that incident enabled Israel to quickly win that global media contest.

Currently, the media battle is "only getting harder" because "the truth doesn't really matter anymore" to a media that promotes the false narrative that Israel is an "aggressor, foreign colonial power [that] indiscriminately targets and kills Palestinians." The recent murder of three Israelis by a Palestinian terrorist's car-ramming attack resulted in media outlets displaying their biases devoid of any "historic perspective." Ramot, where the terrorist struck, has been an established Israeli neighborhood since the 1970s and is situated within the city limits of Jerusalem. Although most of Ramot is located on land Israel liberated from Jordan's control in the Six-Day War, many global media outlets reported that Ramot is a "settlement." In essence, the media blamed the six-year-old, his eight-year old brother, and the twenty-year old newlywed for their own deaths in an "occupied" area instead of reporting the truth about the victims — that a Palestinian terrorist targeted civilians by using his car as a weapon to kill Jews waiting in an Israeli bus shelter.

Much like military deterrence on the battlefield, HR restores "deterrence" on the media frontline by challenging the narrative. To further its aims, the organization has succeeded in getting seven antisemitic journalists who praised Adolf Hitler fired. HR vetted Fady Hanona, the journalist who covered last summer's Gaza war for the New York Times, by researching his social media pronouncements posted in Arabic. Hoffman met with Patrick Kingsley, the New York Times bureau chief, and exposed Hanona's hateful social media rhetoric comments that included, "I'm in favor of killing [the Jews] and burning them like Hitler did." HR team's discovery that two more journalists praised Hitler or terror attacks led to other terminations at CNN and Reuters. By and large, media outlets appreciate and respect HR for ensuring that the media adheres to high journalistic standards because, as Kingsley told Hoffman, "We're both in the truth-telling business."

The West's late arch nemesis, Osama bin Laden, said the "key to winning a war is winning the media war." Israel's enemies have noticed HR's investigative success on social media. Accordingly, 350 Palestinian journalists signed a letter "condemning" the organization. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran's round-the-clock propaganda channel, Press TV, broadcast video reports targeting HR. Press TV went so far as to show an image of Hoffman and his child in an effort to "intimidate" him. Undeterred, Hoffman persists in his message that "blatant" antisemitic journalists who glorify terror cannot report objectively on Israel, and HR is committed to exposing them.

Although Hoffman perceives that the world is no longer "blindly" following anti-Israel narratives, recent shifts in Israel's current government have stoked the anti-Israel media fire. The media portray the "incorrect narrative" of a "right-wing, hawkish, hardline, ultra-right government," in contrast to the good press Israel received with its previous "more diverse" government. The pronouncement by the head of an ultra-Orthodox party member of the coalition that in "matters of religion and state" there will be no changes, has proven the global media wrong in reporting that the current government is looking to alter the status quo in Israel regarding religious matters.

Hoffman persists in his message that "blatant" antisemitic journalists who glorify terror cannot report objectively on Israel, and HR is committed to exposing them.

At present, Israel's proposed legal reforms are getting "bad press," with the media giving short shrift to the "two sides" of the debate. While there are valid concerns that the reforms will affect the "checks and balances between [Israel's] executive, legislative, and judicial branches" and harm democracy, the other side also makes a valid point in claiming the Supreme Court has had "too much power over the last 30 years." Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu maintains that the reforms will "improve the Israeli economy, strengthen it and strengthen our democracy," but the fact remains that Israel is "under a microscope more than anyone else in the world," and HR is cognizant of global media's "increased scrutiny."

HR is "punching above its weight" with its three writers and one social media staffer. Media Central, an arm of HR, engages in "journalistic outreach" by establishing relationships with journalists and media outlets and providing briefings and background information for journalists in order to "understand the nuances." HR also uses Meltwater, a costly media monitoring and analysis program, to conduct "forensic research" in mainstream and social media.

With its limited budget for technological software, its record of successes, and the dedication of its small staff, supporting HR as a force multiplier on the media battlefield is a critical part of Israel's ongoing struggle to restore deterrence on the military battlefield as well as on North America's college campuses.

To report anti-Israel coverage in the mainstream and social media, write to action@honestreporting.com

Subscribe to Honest Reporting and share its posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

Marilyn Stern is communications coordinator at the Middle East Forum.

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WHERE ARE ALL THE WHITE PEOPLE?

What Suddenly Happened to the White People in America?

Of the 328.2 Million total citizens, there are 236.5 Million Whites in

the United States or 72% of the population!

A spreadsheet of TV commercials shows the following over a 4 month period:

White men have all but disappeared .

When they are in commercials they are either:

· Old, ugly and sick or:

Ø They are the partner of a black woman

Ø And have no speaking part.

Or have a gay male partner.

· In 3 of the commercials the white men are doing laundry and always paired with a little girl to whom they are delivering the clean clothes.

There were zero commercials of White fathers and sons. None!

· Equally disturbing, young white boys and teens have also disappeared.

· The study found a majority of the children were white girls

with a black "brother."

· Mostly TV commercial couples consist of a white woman with a black man.

Are they trying to program the young people of today?

Amazingly, in the month of December there was an uptick in good looking white male models. Research determined that in each and every case it was a cologne commercial and every one of those commercials were made in Europe where they still use muscular, masculine white men.

One insurance commercial featured a good looking white guy in his 20's. He was so mind-numbingly stupid that he was incapable of delivering his lines and couldn't even say "Liberty Mutual" the insurance company featured in the commercial.

Over a period of 4 months it concluded that:

While the African American population in America is only 12% they were in 84.3% of the commercials.

Black males are only 5% of our population yet were in 79.7% of the ads.

White males make up the largest segment of our population:

· Yet were only in 4% of the TV commercials!

· In most of those cases they are in their 60's to 80's and

were pushing medication for debilitating diseases, reverse mortgages (i.e. Tom Selleck) or Medicare plans.

· While the study had many, many more alarming facts, one that really stands out is that:

Ø each and every ad for new cars featured a woman driver except for Lincoln.

Ø Only one ad included a white male passenger and he is not behind

the wheel, a black woman is.

Ø In the commercials for automobiles there were more black women

drivers than white women.

Ø Again, Europe was the exception here Mercedes and BMW had NO

VISIBLE DRIVERS!! They showed the cars cruising highways with license

plates that were obviously European but never allowed a view where the

driver was visible. I found that very interesting.

This questions:

· Who casts these commercial shoots?

· Who directs the directors to cast certain ‘types’?

· How did this trend in commercials happen all at the same time?

· Was it at federal government direction?

· Can you say conspiracy?

What is going on here?

· Demasculinization of the White American Male?

· Looks like White lives don’t matter and Black privilege has taken over!

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The Toxic Racialist Obsessions of Joe Biden

Somehow Biden has transferred his own checkered history of racial disparagement onto the white working class.

bY Victor Davis Hanson

Joe Biden ran on “unity,” which is critical in a multiracial America. He vowed to heal the divisions supposedly sown by Donald Trump. Instead, he is proving to be the most polarizing president in modern memory. Often his racialist rhetoric and condescension have proven demeaning to both blacks and whites. In a volatile multiracial democracy that demands tolerance and restraint, a highly unpopular Biden, for cheap political advantage, continually proves incendiary and reckless.

Last week Joe Biden snarked after watching a White House screening of Till:

Lynched for simply being black, nothing more. With white crowds, white families gathered to celebrate the spectacle, taking pictures of the bodies and mailing them as postcards. Hard to believe, but that’s what was done. And some people still want to do that.

Exactly who are these “some people”? Who fits Biden’s innuendos of contemporary “some people” who, he alleges in 2023, still wish, as “white crowds, white families” of the past, to mail celebratory postcards after they lynch black people? The Ultra-MAGA villains of his recent Phantom of the Opera speech? Have his current targets ever echoed anything like Biden’s own racist past warning that busing would force people to “grow up in a racial jungle”?

What current data might support Biden’s absurd charges? Is Biden referring to federal interracial crime and hate crime statistics charting violent white propensities against blacks? None exist. In fact, they continually reveal that so-called whites are underrepresented as perpetrators in both categories, while overrepresented as victims in interracial crimes—dramatically so in the case of black-on-white violent crime.

In our sensationalist YouTube world, are we suffering an epidemic of Internet-fed, white-on-black incendiary crimes that might have prompted the president’s demagogic accusations? Not at all. Most of the most recent publicized interracial violence—a woman in a gym fighting off a would-be rapist, a bicyclist doctor stabbed to death in an intersection as his attacker spewed racial hatred, a 26-year-old mother lethally shot in the back in front of her children in a parking lot over a minor argument, a young boy violently choked on a bus, a small girl on a bus beaten repeatedly by two teenage boys—have involved black perpetrators and apparent white victims. So, what contemporary evidence or widely publicized anecdotes prompt Biden’s recent charges of “white rage”-fueled violence?

Yet simultaneously with Biden’s blanket and unsupported charges of racism, no president since Woodrow Wilson has offloaded more racialist verbiage than Joe Biden himself. In an eerie example of psychological projection, never has a president accused others of racism more, while freely revealing himself either to be a racist or non compos mentis, or both.

Stranger still, Biden’s latest accusation comes from a president who once eulogized the former racist, Exalted Cyclops, and segregationist Senator. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) as “one of my mentors” and lamented that “the Senate is a lesser place for his going.” That was no isolated fluke.

During his campaign for the presidency, Biden in 2019 praised segregationist Senator James O. Eastland for not labeling a younger Biden with the derogatory term “boy”: “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”

How odd, then, that Biden, as president no less, has used just that derogatory insult “boy” for distinguished blacks. Indeed, the very day before Biden leveled his “some people” slur, he was back at it with his racist “boy” reference to the black governor of Maryland: “You got a hell of a new governor in Wes Moore, I tell ya,” Biden told an audience of union workers on Wednesday. “He’s the real deal, and the boy looked like he could still play. He got some guns on him.”

Such condescension was consistent with Biden’s past usage of “Negro” and his earlier August 2021 similar “boy” trope of referring to one of own top aides: “I’m here with my senior adviser and boy who knows Louisiana very, very well and New Orleans, Cedric Richmond.”

In Biden world, blacks seem to be a collective to whom he can pander in stereotypical terms, as opposed to Latinos, whom Biden feels can think for themselves. Or so he said on the campaign trail in 2020, “Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”

These were “gaffes” only if one believes Biden’s frequent racialist smears and slurs are more the symptoms of senility than bias. Again, as a 2020 candidate, Biden gave us his absurd racist “Corn Pop” fables. In these concocted, He-Man sagas, Biden stood down purported ghetto gangster with his own custom-cut chain, while often showing his tanned legs’ golden hairs to curious inner-city black youth.

Biden also smeared two black journalists who had the temerity to ask him a few tough questions, one with the now infamous slang ad hominem, “You ain’t black” and the other with the personal dismissal “junkie.”

A consistent trope in these insults is his lifelong condescension of accomplished black Americans, such as his long-ago infamous talk-down to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during Biden’s travesty of conducting his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings. In that context we also remember Biden’s idiotic warning, replete with his accustomed affected black patois, to black professionals in 2012 that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”

Like Bill Clinton, who reportedly uttered of supposed 2008 upstart Barack Obama, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” Biden was especially bewildered by Barack Obama. He apparently seemed, in Biden’s racialist view, an aberration from Biden’s own usual stereotyped views of blacks of limited ability: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” That assessment came from a candidate, who, even predementia, could never string together more than a few coherent sentences.

Biden, remember, explained top-performing states in education as attributable to fewer minorities: “There’s less than 1 percent of the population in Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So, look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with.”

In a world of law schools turning out record numbers of black lawyers, and billionaire entrepreneurs like Bob Johnson, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey, or Michael Jordan, Biden opines, “The data shows young black entrepreneurs are just as capable of succeeding given the chance as white entrepreneurs are. But they don’t have lawyers. They don’t have, they don’t have accountants, but they have great ideas.”

The reason we do not associate Biden with characteristic racist stereotyping and tropes, other than with raw political demagoguery, is the same reason we give passes to liberals who say overtly racist things, which might otherwise suggest that their loud progressive rhetoric serves as some sort of psychological mechanism to square the circle of their own discomfort with the proverbial other.

Do we remember the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s quickly hushed up and contextualized confession that abortion was targeting the proper people. (“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”)?

Do we recall liberal icon and former Senate Majority Harry Reid, who eerily dovetailed Biden with similarly racist assessment of Obama (“a ‘light-skinned’ African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”)?

Somehow Biden has transferred his own checkered history of racial disparagement onto the white working class. Fact checkers assure us that when Joe Biden libeled Trump supporters as “chumps” and “dregs” he really meant the Ku Klux Klan or white nationalists who gravitate to Trump. But most took his blanket smears as they were intended. And they fit the larger patterns of his more recent “semi-fascism” smears, and indeed, the genre of tired leftwing demagoguery that earlier gave us Obama’s “clingers,” Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” or the smelly who stink up Walmart in the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page joint text trove: “Just went to a Southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”

In occasional opportunistic moments, Biden transforms into “ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton” to accentuate his middle-class roots. But he has a repugnant propensity for using racial terms of condescension and disparagement and for projecting his own unease onto a supposedly racist white middle class and poor even as he seeks to win support from the very minority communities he has so often crudely characterized.

What is the concrete result of this now common Bidenesque schizophrenia?

Consider the toxic plume that has polluted the skies over East Palestine, Ohio, a working-class small town that is 98 percent white, with a median income of $26,000, and sits amid the Pennsylvania borderland. That very region once rejected in its 2008 primary Barack Obama—and in turn was blasted in stereotyped fashion by him: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton resonates that same contempt for the convenient target of the white poor and lower middle class. Rather than send in FEMA on day one of the toxic release with tents, mobile kitchens, and supplies and medical personnel to care for the evacuated, the federal government waited two weeks and then acted only when even the liberal media was confused by Biden’s deliberate neglect.

Amid the disaster, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in his now tired boilerplate, was on record instead railing against supposed white hardhats who supposedly do not look like the communities in which they work. For a Biden or Buttigieg, the fish and animals dying from toxic air or water were insignificant artifacts, as were the complaints of burning lungs and allergic reactions to the black chemical cloud.

One wonders what would have been the immediate reaction of Biden and the federal government had a corporation decided to vent the contents of wrecked rail cars full of vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate and then to light up the escaping gas, birthing a toxic black plume over Martha’s Vineyard or Malibu, as opposed to East Palestine or, say, South-Central L.A. or Ferguson, Missouri.

Biden would have sent legions of aid workers in to ensure social justice for the marginalized and performance-art reassurance to his donor class.

Whether Biden spouts racial bombast to curry favor with his Democratic base or to project onto others his own habitual racist put downs is not quite clear. But Biden’s utter contempt for white poor and lower middle classes, who are were deemed not worthy of the prompt federal attention customarily accorded to others in times of disaster, is self-evident.

Otherwise, Biden would have sent help immediately rather than smear “some people” as 21st-century lynchers.

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Joe Biden Colluded With National Archives, Report Finds

(PresidentialHill.com)- After documents were found in Joe Biden’s old office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, the National Archives arranged with the president’s attorneys to have them transferred from their Boston law office to the National Archives, according to emails obtained through a FOIA request.

The Associated Press and other outlets obtained over 70 pages of emails between National Archives officials and lawyers for the president that provide more detail about the initial discovery of classified records found in Biden’s possession.

In an email dated November 7, 2022, National Archives General Counsel Gary Stern told lawyers Patrick Moore and Bob Bauer to make sure the boxes removed from the Penn Biden Center were stored in a locked, secure location in their Boston law office that would not be “accessed by anyone.”

Moore reportedly took the documents from the Penn Biden Center to his Boston law office before the classified documents were discovered. However, it is unclear from the emails if the classified records were among those transferred to Moore’s office in Boston.

In a November 8 email, Gary Stern wrote to Moore and Bauer to arrange for the boxes to be transferred from their law office to the JFK library the following day. Moore replied that he was in Washington but would have his colleague facilitate the transfer of the documents.

The classified documents were initially discovered among the Penn Biden Center records on November 2. However, the Biden administration did not publicly disclose the discovery until January.

Another set of classified documents was discovered in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington home on December 20. The White House didn’t disclose that until January 12.

CNN reported this week that there had been two searches of Biden’s records housed at the University of Delaware that were previously unknown.

According to CNN, on two separate days in recent weeks, the FBI searched two locations at the University of Delaware and retrieved some materials which are being reviewed by the FBI. However, a source familiar with the investigation told CNN that the materials retrieved do not appear to contain classified markings.

According to the source, the searches were conducted with the cooperation and consent of the president’s lawyers.

Middle East and Other Musings

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

A MULTITUDE OF TOPICS.

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